Magnicidio / Elizabeth Araujo

Assassination

There are some Chavistas who refuse to take the assassination thesis seriously. One that has been promoted by Chávez himself on his expensive world tours, which he pays for with funds belonging to all Venezuelans. One of these skeptics suspects this is merely another invention by Eva Golinger, a Venezuelan-American lawyer who lives in New York and who was one of the managers of the lobby undertaken by Miraflores Palace in 2003, in hopes of securing a meeting between Bush and the Venezuelan President. When the effort to help the leader of el proceso visit the White House failed, the idea of the assassination attempt emerged. This is what my Chavista friend says, referring to the anecdote from Aesop's Fables, which you probably know: the fox who can't reach the grapes and who ends up assuming they weren't ripe.

Whether this is true or not, the story behind Eva Golinger is truly priceless. She's the person in charge of revolutionary matters in the bowels of the imperialist monster. There are some who affirm that she organizes the Bolivarian crowds in front of the UN headquarters, when President Chávez attends meetings there, each time a bit fatter, for conferences which he himself has labelled "useless" and which "only serve the purpose of talking about hunger."

It was precisely Eva Golinger, in collaboration with the journalist Jeremy Bigwood, who discovered that the State Department was "financing" (through the National Endowment for Democracy) the electoral organization Súmate, for which its director, María Corina Machado, automatically became stigmatized as a traitor to Venezuela.

According to one journalist, who claims to know her adventures and actions, Golinger works for the Venezuela Information Office (VIO) in the U.S. who, alongside the Center for Economic Policy and Research (CEPR) in Washington D.C., manage the VIO center which promotes the propaganda of el proceso. That's where the thesis of a possible assassination of the President was born. Let us call it the perfect excuse for recycling the chain of justifications as to why Hugo Chávez hasn't managed to reduce poverty but has instead multiplied it.

If before it was the April coup, and later the oil workers' strike and then that waste of time known as the recall referendum, now it is Bush's whim to eliminate the leader that serves to deny the hope Venezuelans have for an efficient and productive government.

It is obvious that Chávez and his acolytes—some for opportunistic reasons and others due to idiocy—will continue to ride this myth, harvesting pity and inflaming the passions of those in other countries who await a messiah. The theme would make an interesting movie, which someone should consider producing. For now, we can resign ourselves to reading Eva Golinger, who has just baptized El Código Chávez at the International Book Fair in Cuba. A book that will help perpetuate the legend of the good President who was not allowed to govern.




{ Elizabeth Araujo, TalCual, 8 March 2005 }